GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1120 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 8 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 71040 (112%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (approximately 105%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25776 (105%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (about 181%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18540 (181%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.